As the Taxi & Limousine Commission prepares to launch its dollar-van program along now-defunct bus routes, transit advocates are watching to see how and if these routes become profitable. The MTA says many of their eliminated routes were cost-prohibitive to run, but tossing these services to private operators allows for more flexibility. Private operators can run fewer buses and aren’t beholden to the demands of a public-benefit corporation as the MTA is. Whether these routes can be run at cost or with a profit remains to be seen.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, Jen Weiczner profiles the Hampton Jitney, one of New York’s longest running and most successful private transportation companies. The Jitney, which offers luxury trips to the Hamptons over the summer and chartered rides in the winter, makes $20 million a year and, as Weiczner reports, has cornered the market on mass transit to the Hamptons. “For 36 years, the company has maintained a near monopoly on express transportation to the Hamptons,” she writes, “drawing passengers with newspapers, snacks and beverages – all handed out, airplane-style, by uniformed attendants. And every so often, passengers get goodie bags with products that advertisers pay the Jitney to distribute like Tory Burch gift cards and Vera Bradley accessories.”
Of course, the Hamptons Jitney is in a bit of a unique situation. It caters to a very wealthy clientele that expects upper-class service, and it covers distances greater than any New York City bus route would. Still, the Jitney shows that public transportation can be, in limited ways, a profitable undertaking. I don’t expect the dollar vans to fair quite as well, but if run properly, they should be adequate replacements for the lost bus service.
3 comments
The thing is that the routes that were chosen were routes that were fairly cost-efficient to begin with before they were eliminated. An operator would be crazy if they took over a route like the S55/S56 withou government subsidies(they weren’t eliminated, but they do have a cost per passenger of $6.58, so there is always the chance that the MTA would decide to eliminate them, even though it deemed them “required for network coverage” this time). They took over routes that parallelled other, more popular routes, but were still fairly cost-effective.
I question whether or not these routes would actually turn a profit. The average fare paid was $1.14 on weekdays and, even if those routes had all the passengers pay $2.00, there would still be a reduced number of passengers.
I want to do a little verbal hygiene here about the word “privatization.” Privatization is where a government takes a public service and contracts it out to the private sector. As far as I know, there was never a public bus agency that ran express routes from Manhattan to the Hamptons. Hampton Jitney and Hampton Luxury Liner are independent ventures in private transit, not privatized transit.
And they show that if you can successfully market transit as a luxury good, people will pay for it. The only subsidies that Hampton Jitney gets are the same ones that private auto drivers get: cheap gas, a free LIE, and free protection from the State Police. Oh, they do get to use the HOV lanes.
As a Hamptonite, I’d point out you’ve mischaracterized a bit. First, the Jitney is a year-round service, running a very frequent schedule even in the winter. Second, it isn’t exactly the bus of the rich and famous, plenty of everyday people like me ride it into NY, it’s simply a far more user-friendly service than the LIRR, which runs perhaps 3 times daily out of season, takes longer and is less convenient if you’re going to the East Side (there’s a reason we’re contemplating setting up our own local system and leaving the LIRR, which would be interesting to cover). The ambassador class service and the competing Luxury liner are the real froufrou ways to travel. Also, if you get a ticketbook, which most people I know do, the price gets knocked down to something like $19 per trip, which is about par for the course for medium distance busses, right?